Face Image Conformance to ISO/ICAO Standards in Machine Readable Travel Documents

Face images to be included into machine readable travel documents have to fulfill quality requirements defined by international ISO standards. The concept of quality in this context extends the common idea of image quality: usually a bad quality image presents visual defects such as blurring or noise while, according to ISO/ICAO standard, other factors could make a given sample a poor quality image (e.g., presence of dark glasses or mouth open). The verification of face image conformance to ISO/ICAO standards is carried out mostly by humans today, through visual inspection, since a totally automatic evaluation is still not satisfactory. The objective of this work is to present the BioLab-ICAO framework, an evaluation benchmark which will be made available to the scientific community, designed to encourage the research on this topic; it consists of a large ground truth database, a well-defined testing protocol, and baseline algorithms for image compliance verification.